Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Mars was empty before we came. That’s not to say that nothing had ever happened. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobserved. There were no witnesses—except for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.

So perhaps it is not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a peculiar weight on the tongue—Nirgal, Mangala, Auqakuh, Harmakhis—they sound as if they were even older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they were fossil words from the Ice Age or before. Yes, for thousands of years Mars was a sacred power in human affairs; and its color made it a dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the heart.

Because we are still those animals who survived the Ice Age, and looked up at the night sky in wonder, and told stories. And Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from our very beginning—a great sign, a great symbol, a great power. And so we came here. It had been a power; now it became a place.

How to say it? How to say that they alone in all that rocky world were alive, their faces glowing like paper lanterns in the light? How to say that even if living creatures were no more than carriers for ruthless genes, this was still somehow better than the blank mineral nothingness of everything else?

It always seemed to him that sunset more than any other time of day made it clear that they stood on an alien planet; something in the slant and redness of the light was fundamentally wrong, upsetting expectations wired into the savannah brain over millions of years.

Filled with so many emotions at once, it was impossible not to be confused; it was an interference pattern, some feelings canceled, others reinforced.

Dealing with the more implausible scenarios sometimes took on a kind of surreal black humor,

The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.

“The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.”

The red crescent grew to the size of a quarter, and the feeling of tension grew as well, as if it were the hour before a thunderstorm, and the air charged with dust and creosote and static electricity. As if the god of war were really up there on that blood dot, waiting for them.

And yet some of us here can accept transforming the entire physical reality of this planet, without doing a single thing to change our selves, or the way we live.

Yes, it was a great morning on Mars.

“That’s life on Mars.” This was already a popular refrain, used whenever they encountered a problem, especially an intractable one.

I love you, I love you!” “You love gravity.”

Here they were on Mars, where the seasons were twice as long as Earth’s, and every day was forty minutes longer: why couldn’t people relax?

human circadian biorhythms had been set over millions of years of evolution, and now suddenly to have extra minutes of day and night, day after day, night after night—no doubt it had effects.

So in effect they were building a road. But they seldom had to use the rock-moving equipment on Lunae;

They were heading northeast to avoid the canyon systems of Tempe and Mareotis, and this route took them down Lunae to the long slope of Chryse Planitia. Both these regions looked much like the land around their base camp, bumpy and strewn with small rocks,

It was a new pleasure to Nadia, to drive on and on and see new countryside continually pop over the horizon: hillocks, dips,

satellite photos that there were unusual mineral outcroppings near Perepelkin Crater.

The horizon ahead was sometimes twenty kilometers off, sometimes three. Craters became rare, and the ones they passed were surrounded by low mounds that rayed out from the rims—splosh craters, where meteors had landed in permafrost that had turned to hot mud in the impact. Nadia’s companions spent a day wandering eagerly over the splayed hills around one of these craters. The rounded slopes, Phyllis said, indicated ancient water as clearly as the grain in petrified wood indicated the original tree. By the way she spoke Nadia understood that this was another of her disagreements with Ann; Phyllis believed in the long wet past model, Ann in the short wet past.

Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

The sun touched the horizon, and the dune crests faded to shadow. The little button sun sank under the black line to the west. Now the sky was a maroon dome, the high clouds the pink of moss campion. Stars were popping out everywhere, and the maroon sky shifted to a vivid dark violet, an electric color that was picked up by the dune crests, so that it seemed crescents of liquid twilight lay across the black plain. Suddenly Nadia felt a breeze swirl through her nervous system, running up her spine and out into her skin; her cheeks tingled, and she could feel her spinal cord thrum. Beauty could make you shiver!

the shadowed western ice side took on a variety of pale colors: the purest water ice was clear and bluish, but most of the hillside was a translucent ivory, copiously tinted by pink and yellow dust. Irregular patches of CO2 ice were a bright pure white; the contrast between dry ice and water ice was vivid, and made it impossible to read the actual contours of the hillside.

“You know they’ve found meteorites on Earth that came from Mars.

it weren’t for the lack of gravity, it would be a great place,”

“There’s no sign of life on the surface,” he would say mildly. “If it does exist it has to be underground, near volcanic vents I suppose.

“The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe.

And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.”

Mars will always remain Mars, different from Earth, colder and wilder. But it can be Mars and ours at the same time. And it will be. There is this about the human mind: if it can be done, it will be done. We can transform Mars and build it like you would build a cathedral, as a monument to humanity and the universe both. We can do it, so we will do it.

In the flat dead tone that she usually employed when she was upset, she said, “I think you value consciousness too high, and rock too little. We are not lords of the universe. We’re one small part of it. We may be its consciousness, but being the consciousness of the universe does not mean turning it all into a mirror image of us.

By these criteria you are queen of Mars.”

For the northern combination, extroverted and stabile, was clearly what Hippocrates, Galen, Aristotle, Trimestigus, Wundt, and Jung would have called sanguine; the western point, extroverted and labile, was choleric; in the east, introverted and stabile was phlegmatic; and in the south, introverted and labile was of course the very definition of the melancholic!

kami and viriditas, Mars and Earth, hatred and love, absence and yearning.

“Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that

And yet there they stood nevertheless, all the oh-so-familiar faces changed, aged in all the ways human faces age: time texturing them with erosion as if they had lived for geological ages, giving them a knowing look, as if one could see the aquifers behind their eyes.

“This is home,” Hiroko said. “This is where we start again.”